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FEATURED STORIES
The EContent team suggests some sites, projects, and resources that—while outside the scope of the EContent 100 list—are well worth taking a closer look at.
COLUMNS
It's really a jungle out there in the Content Management System space. For the past couple of years, I have attended the Gilbane Conference in Boston and reported on the number of CMSs listed in various online directories, like the Google directory, Business.com, the Yahoo! portal, etc. There are well over a thousand systems listed, perhaps even two thousand. I myself edited several hundred entries in the DMOZ Open Directory Project (which has more than 1,000 in its various subcategories) and in my CMS Review (with a few hundred).
So what’s with all the nonsense words being thrown about by well-intentioned marketing people at econtent companies? Nearly every Web site I look at and almost all the press releases I receive are laden with meaningless jargon that’s just plain annoying. As I was cruising around looking at econtent company sites and press pages while serving as part of the EContent 100 decision-making group, it became clear that most companies in this business just aren’t communicating well.
It is now a tradition in the annual EContent 100 issue that we climb way out on a limb and anticipate promising new sources of revenue for the coming year. Even as 2005 closes, it is already clear that boatloads of money are about to start racing online, especially from big media TV and radio brands desperately chasing audiences that are fragmenting into smaller niches of personalized, on-demand media consumption. In past years, advertising drove many of the trends online, but this coming year much of the energy will be coming from the media industry itself as it tries to retool for an on-demand future.
I recently returned from giving two weeks of workshops on using the Web for research and was surprised at the number of people who were unfamiliar with blogs and their use for research purposes. One of the first questions I heard was, “How do I search blogs? That’s not on Google, right?” Well, the 800-pound gorilla has made another hefty move, and now we can use Google to search at least some of the blogosphere.
It seems like an eternity since the initial promises of XML, and many have faded from memory. Remember any? Pay the considerable cost of using XML to structure your documents, and they would pay you back by providing ways to convert, reuse, reassemble, or analyze them. Invest in structure now; get dividends soon. It’s been a long wait, but interacting with documents may be just around the corner.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of Alta Vista in December 1995 and more than 40 years since the first full-text search engine with Boolean operators became operational. Indeed, most of the features now commonplace on enterprise search engines had been developed and commercialized by the mid-1970s. So you would think that the use of enterprise search technology would be well-established and reliable by now.
As we wrap up 2005, we should be well on the way to digital nirvana, everyone zooming down the infobahn consuming (and paying for) vast quantities of digital content. We should be getting full measure from our broadband connections—always connected, always in touch, always consuming. Yet somehow potholes keep emerging on that infobahn. In the past few months alone, high-profile columns and incidents have revealed a couple of deep ruts.
I don't own a cell phone and rarely carry a laptop or PDA because, quite frankly, I have too much information and communication already. I do some of my best idea-formulation (even writing) during the brief lulls in between info-streams. The content clutter has to clear and then coalesce for things to make any larger sense. It isn't that I think I don't need to know more. I know I do.
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